


in your shoes

by avoidfilledwithcelluloid



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Established Relationship, L is a professor/Light is his student, M/M, More implication of Light being hot for L's voice...as usual..., Sexual Tension, Shoe Kink, University AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:13:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22405516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avoidfilledwithcelluloid/pseuds/avoidfilledwithcelluloid
Summary: "For a long time, L thrived on his own difference: how he stood away from others, how they were smaller or bigger than him in unappealing ways. Yet with Light, being near the same size in everything was comforting – that he could slip into L’s clothes, his home, his life, without a wrinkle. A shared shoe size was a cipher for a shared consciousness, a knowledge between the two of them no one else had."(Written for pashmina-dhaage on tumblr as part of the Sexy Enquirer exchange. after L sees his student/paramour Light step in mud, he rushes to give him the shoes off his own feet.)
Relationships: L/Yagami Light
Comments: 12
Kudos: 92
Collections: Sexy Enquirer





	in your shoes

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is one of the fics i wrote as a gift, and I'm happy to post it to ao3 now aha. much easier reading on this site's format. anyway, a quick note if you're worried but in this fic Light is about 23 and in his second year of grad school i'd guess? L is older than him and his professor, but they are both adults. Also L is like...a bad professor and only has the job bc his adopted dad is the uni dean - his true passion is publishing papers under a pseudonym about abolishing the prison industrial complex. of course, this isn't mentioned in the fic but you might like to know it going in. (Light helps him write the papers and does the proofreading.)

The phone rang on L’s desk and woke him from a dream about rain. In the dream, water had poured from open windows into his office – filling every corner as he was unable to move. Yet the rain was warm, swallowing him into a loving embrace. He fluttered his eyes open in a dreary, reluctant way and grabbed the phone, answering it in a quiet voice.

“Hello?”

“Come down.” Light spoke in a sharp, yet hushed tone. “Please. You need to come outside.”

“Why? Are you injured?”

“No. There’s a big mud puddle outside the building, and I can’t get across.”

“Hm? Where’d the mud come from?”

A long sigh rumbled through the phone and L sat up, stretching his arms after they’d cramped post-nap. As he reached toward the ceiling, his eyes caught the glaze of rainfall over his office window. Phone pressed between his shoulder and head, L stood and pushed his leather chair back before peering out across the university courtyard. In his ear, Light muttered low, upset Japanese.

“You shouldn’t sleep so much during the day,” he said. “What if I called and you didn’t pick up? Then you’d snore right through your next class, and we’d both be in trouble.”

“I’m too tired to stay awake all day.” L dragged out his vowels, letting a near-lecherous smile leak into his voice. “Too many strenuous nighttime activities make it hard to keep up.”

Through the window, he watched students stumble through mud in fruit-candy colored mackintoshes, their gait sluggish in the soft falling drizzle. When he peered down at the front entrance of his building – the central one for criminal sciences, or crim-sci as the course guide called it – there was a moat formed between the lawn and concrete steps. A few students arriving for his noon theory and practice class leapt over the muddy cave-in, but one person – the _most_ important one, to L at least – stood with an arm crossed over his chest right at the moat’s edge.

“Imply that our relationship is the cause for your bad work ethic again,” Light said, “and it’s over for good. Now, come help me get across.”

L clicked his tongue. “Why don’t you just jump across?” He tapped the window, waiting to see if Light glanced his way and then waved when the ant-sized Light glared at him from below. “If I come down to carry you across, people will think I’m giving you special treatment.”

“I didn’t ask you to carry me.” A faint scuffling backgrounded Light’s frustrated tone. “But I guess you’re right. People would talk. I’ll have to try and jump.”

“I have faith in you,” L said. “You can do it.”

“Don’t say that stuff like that.” Light lowered his voice, hesitating. “Encouraging me in that type of voice.”

“Which voice? This is how I always talk.”

“No. That voice is deeper. It’s,” Light inhaled and sighed. “It’s making me hard.”

“Ah.” L grinned. “Yes. I used it last night, didn’t I? When you were sucking my cock, doing such a good job.”

“Exactly.” L watched Light roll his shoulders back as he spoke and remembered the same motion – done as L had trailed kisses down the other man’s spine. “I have to hang up. I can’t jump on the phone.”

Before L could utter a goodbye, the receiver clicked and the call ended. He snorted, slipping the phone into his trouser pocket, and looked out the window. Books held to his chest and bag strapped over his chest, Light hesitated before he stepped back – momentum to build to a futile leap. Landing foot first into the mud, Light stumbled through it in percussive, upset stomps until he wobbled onto the concrete steps.

Eyes still tracing the shaking bend of Light’s back, L began pulling out the laces of his black oxfords. He could never entirely keep his eyes off Light, to be honest. To close off visions of the man – always front row in L’s seminars; always dressed in dark sweaters and high-waist trousers; always pursing his lips like a bow ready to shoot an arrow into someone’s heart – would be akin to blocking out the sun.

Something more than fate pushed him to ask the intrepid man to meet him after office hours for coffee – desire, which L always caved to. Was desire what moved Light to ask about extra study sessions, alone in L’s off-campus apartment? He liked to think they were run through by the same sword of yearning and pulled to each other by mirrored amorous wounds. But he couldn’t count those thoughts as true; L enjoyed the fantasy of someone loving him back more than the reality of simple shared lust.

He tucked two fingers into the heel of one shoe and pulled it off before doing the same to its brother. With both shoes hanging off the crooked index and middle finger on his left hand, L headed to the downstairs lobby.

The criminal science building was built sometime before L’s adoptive father, Quillsh Wammy, was dean of the liberal arts university his son currently taught at. Much of its outdated charms, like leaky bathroom faucets, thin jade green carpeting, and wide, grand staircase, were holdovers from the late 20s when Wammy redecorated the campus to suit his Gatsby-ian sensibilities. L swung around the second floor banister to thunder down the last flight of steps in socked feet. A few students passed him and offered mumbled greetings – their faces ashen as they trudged upward to L’s American colleague Stephen’s counterterrorism lecture. He didn’t begrudge them their unhappiness; hearing about the dull yet terrifying intelligence state even over a light lunch with Dr. Gevanni drove L to take three ibuprofens. Light had given him a stunningly cold lecture about the damage ibuprofen abuse could do but still let L lay his head in his lap, petting his hair and talking about his watercolor elective.

In the first floor lobby, students cloistered themselves in damp circles around worn furniture. Light sat alone on a chaise lounge, somehow taking up the entire cushion despite not occupying much actual space on the couch. His presence was larger than his body. Over his shoulders, his grayish green coat was powdered by the rainstorm but not sodden, unlike his poor drenched footwear. Some women walked past him, their gait stilted in obvious coordination, to issue soft concerned questions L couldn’t hear as he approached Light. His heart – stupidly – lifted when Light refused to answer the women’s questions. Instead, sharp, clear brown eyes followed L from the stairs until he stood toe to toe with Light’s loafers.

Unspeaking, L dropped to his knees. He grabbed Light by the ankle and lifted his muddy shoe, turning it this way and that. Flecks of yellow threaded through the brown and green sludge – tiny buttercup petals. Massaging the delicate skin uncovered by sock or pant leg, L froze as fingers dusted through his hair. He turned toward their touch, seeking the sun in them. Light dropped his hand when their eyes met and let it hang – taut in posed casualty.

“Everyone’s staring,” he whispered – just low enough for L alone to hear.

“Hm?” L balanced Light’s heel on his own thigh and began to untie his laces, index and thumb pinching the ends gingerly. “Who’s staring? Besides you.”

“Professor.” Light shook his head, a smile fighting into his tone. “This whole lobby of people thinks we’re doing something inappropriate.”

“I’m only taking off your dirty shoes,” L breathed, his dark eyes flickering to meet Light’s steady gaze. “Do you want me to stop?”

Light swiped his tongue across his lower lip; the arrow finally loosed from the bow and struck L through. His hands fumbled briefly with the laces, catching them a second out of rhythm. Around them, a number of students chatted in soft tones – wet squelches following as they turned, embarrassed and peering over their shoulders. L tugged out the knots until the laces hung limp to the thinning carpet.

“No,” Light said. “Take them off, if you want. I’ll go barefoot for your lecture – more fun for you, hm?”

L laughed. “You won’t be barefoot,” he said. “Although I wouldn’t mind it.” He slipped off first the left shoe, then the right, but paused as he held Light’s foot in his palm. Magenta socks, made of creamy thin knit, encased both feet except for the right big toe. A small hole let skin peek out, and L remembered the exact lifted floorboard in his apartment that had made the hole. His chest simmered as flashes of Light drunk off a Burgundy bottle they’d shared, his smooth yet unskilled dance to one of L’s disco records, and the blush his cheeks got when he tripped over that floorboard – the mourning both of them had for his ruined socks.

“I always wear them for this class.” Light wiggled his toes in L’s grasp, smiling wider when dark eyes flickered up to his face. “They’re good luck.”

“If you keep teasing me like this,” L said, “we’ll run right out of good luck, and everyone will know exactly where you got this hole.”

He grabbed his own shoe and slipped Light’s foot into its glossy black leather. The snug fit burned in his chest likes a slow swallowed asteroid melting his insides. For a long time, L thrived on his own difference: how he stood away from others, how they were smaller or bigger than him in unappealing ways. Yet with Light, being near the same size in everything was comforting – that he could slip into L’s clothes, his home, his life, without a wrinkle. A shared shoe size was a cipher for a shared consciousness, a knowledge between the two of them no one else had.

Once Light’s feet were re-housed in L’s shoes, he stood and offered the man his hand. Light took it, wrapping his long, tapered fingers in a tight squeeze around L’s palm.

“They fit,” Light said. “I guess I can still go to the ball.”

“Let’s have you at class first, Cinderella.” L dropped his hand quickly, missing the warmth within an instant. “First row, I assume?”

“As long as you don’t pick on me the whole class period.” Light spoke, unsteadied, while flexing the hand L let go of. His cheeks speckled pink, he made polite smiles toward a few nosy stares. “I’d hate you to be accused of favoritism.”

“No.” Locked in his throat, L’s voice was distant and his attention hazy on everything that wasn’t Light, who raised an eyebrow at his absent tone. “I won’t— I won’t pick on you. Too much.”

The lecture room was mid-sized, appropriate for a higher level course with a smaller class size, so L couldn’t escape the amused glimmer in all of his students’ eyes as he entered the room in his socked feet. He was known for casual dress – wearing at that moment a loose sweatshirt decorated by a lounging, bikini-clad cat on a beach – but once he began his lesson, most backs straightened out of amusement and into study. Light didn’t follow the rest, however; his brown eyes were warm and bright with laughter he never let touch his lips, posture loose as his legs dangled beneath the table. For the entire class, L had an unobstructed view of his own shoes dancing on Light’s fidgeting feet.

An erection haunted L for the rest of the hour – half hard, but not any less distracting. He kept thinking of Light laid over his office desk, still in L’s oxfords and nothing else, fingering himself with wet, dripping moans; Light kneeling at L’s feet, bent into a perfect bridge to kiss them and then upward to suck his cock; and Light in his own apartment – smaller and colder than L’s place – in those holey magenta socks, bare toe tapping the floor while he showed L how to chop tofu.

L stood behind the podium without moving; his cock was at full mast and unavoidable. Gaze flickering between his lesson notes, the screen projecting his presentation, and all the hungry faces devouring his explanations for the vast, unkind world of criminal science, L paused as he caught Light’s eyes. They were shining, yes, with something he couldn’t name. L so rarely couldn’t name what things were, in fact he lived in spaces and among other people who behaved in ways he could name – selfish; desperate; unhappy. As Light looked at him while writing in his notebook, tapping L’s shoe, wincing at the bad jokes in the presentation, he couldn’t place words to whatever shone there – in Light’s eyes.

After a moment, L stared back at Light, and the other man mouthed something to him. _Thank you._ Light winked and flexed his foot. _I’m so hard._ Light trailed a hand to stroke between his legs, tongue licking over his lips.

A drowning warmth flooded L first in his chest and then in his head, until he was dizzy. Such sensations left him alarmed, yet he didn’t fight the unspoken words surrounding him.

“Class dismissed,” L said, slapping his podium. “I have someone- thing, sorry. Something I need to do.”

Students groaned; others tittered with glee. Clear brown eyes met L’s and shone in mysterious focus. Pink lips wrapped around soundless words: _I love you._ Light smiled with all his teeth.

The words poured in through L’s skin and filled him to bursting. He smiled back at Light and sunk into the words’ beckoning embrace: a dream almost come true.

**Author's Note:**

> thank u so much for reading! if you enjoyed the fic, leave a comment! :^) i'd love to know what you think L and Light do after class lol.


End file.
